Shoe Sale

February 17, 2004 - President’s Day Shoe Sale

The big department stores always seem to be having sales: white sales, year-end sales, men’s sales, after Christmas sales, 10-hour sales, two-day sales, and so on and so forth. Sometimes they have two sales going on at the same time. Even President’s Day Weekend is a reason to cut prices. You could be sure that George Washington would be grinding his wooden teeth under a cherry tree if he knew that his name and image was being used to lure people into shopping malls.

This weekend the dedicated staff of edhat.com went to the malls to get to the root of this American phenomenon. Once again, we were looking at women’s shoes as our unit of measurement. If we didn’t know any better, we would think that Ed has some kind of kinky fetish about shoes. But, we do know better. And, once inside the shoe department at Robinsons-May it was easy to see just why Ed follows the feet with so much interest.

The first thing that knocked the socks off the dedicated staff’s feet was the shear number of women buying shoes. The shoe corral at Robinsons was packed. The line for the cashier was long. And, there were not even enough seats in the department to seat all the men who had been tricked or traded into shopping for shoes with their significant others. With droopy shoulders and glazed over eyes, the men stared hypnotized into the crowd hoping for a way out … anything! … earthquake, power outage, anthrax scare - it didn’t matter. Get me out of this shoe department now!

But into the crowded abyss of women’s shoes the dedicated staff did go trying to figure out what was on sale and what wasn’t. The sale signs on the table were not always clear. The Bandolino dress pumps were on sale, but the Bandolino ballerina flats right next to them weren’t. And while most sales items had red tags stuck inside, some sales items could only be identified by turning them over. The masses were fooled too. We overheard sales clerks breaking the not-on-sale-news to many confused customers during checkout.

We counted all of the women’s shoes that were not on the clearance rack … all 797 of them! That’s a lot of shoes. Of the 797, we found 503 on sale and 294 not. That is 63 percent!

Our contest winner is SBSurfer whose guess of 64 percent just edged out edBoo who guessed 65 percent. SBSurfer wins a choice prize from our edhat.com prize grab bag. That’s two weeks in a row that SBSurfer enters the edhat.com winner’s circle ... hmmm almost as often as there’s a sale at Robinsons-May.

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